Website Disappears? Helen Pollitt Offers a Lifeline
It’s a digital business owner’s worst nightmare: your website suddenly disappears. Poof! Gone. This often happens after a serious disagreement with a hosting company, leaving you feeling stranded. Helen Pollitt recently tackled this very scary situation over at Search Engine Journal, and as someone who helps businesses navigate the online world, I found her advice incredibly practical.
Securing Your Foundations: Domain and Backups
Helen starts with the absolute first step, which I always stress to my clients: you must get control of your domain name. That’s your unique address on the web, and it’s vital. Next, she rightly points out the importance of searching for any backups of your site. Hopefully, you have some! If not, Helen suggests a smart move: checking the Wayback Machine. Think of it like a giant online library that sometimes saves old versions of websites, so you might find some of your lost words and pictures there.
The Rebuilding Blueprint: Starting Anew
Now, if you’re faced with rebuilding from nothing, Helen Pollitt offers a clear plan. She says to focus on your most important pages first – the ones that really matter to your visitors and your business. And here’s a point where Helen and I are in complete agreement: build your new site correctly from the very beginning. This means using simple page names that make sense, writing good descriptions for search engines, and making sure your site loads quickly and looks great on mobile phones. Helen also reminds us to get tools like Google Search Console set up straight away to tell Google you’re back in business.
Lessons Learned and Lingering Questions
Rebuilding is a big job, for sure, but Helen Pollitt’s insights show there’s a clear way forward. It’s all about taking careful, planned steps and, most importantly, learning the lesson to always keep your own website backups somewhere safe. But what happens if your old page links don’t work anymore, and how do you get Google to understand this new site is the official one?
Get the Full Recovery Strategy
For a more detailed look at these recovery strategies, and to get the full picture, you should definitely read Helen Pollitt’s full guide on rebuilding your website after a hosting dispute.